The Waterproof Bible (2 page)

Lisa and Lewis were startled not so much by Rebecca’s unannounced appearance as by the dislike that radiated from her. Lewis turned off his microphone, setting it on the floor. Lisa kept her fingers on the keys, her synthesizer producing a long, sustained E chord.

As she stood there, Rebecca found one more reason to dislike Lewis: he was oblivious to the fact that Lisa was in love with him, a reality Rebecca recognized by the way her sister’s hips were angled towards him and how she kept looking at him, using only her eyes to smile.

“Um, this is my sister,” Lisa finally said, taking her hands off the keys. The drum machine continued to tick. “Rebecca, this is Lewis.”

“Good to meet you, Rebecca.”

Rebecca did not reply with words.

“Maybe we should call it a day?” Lisa asked.

Lewis had already grabbed his bag. “Later,” he said, watching his feet.

The driver opened her door before Rebecca noticed that the limo had stopped. She looked at her watch: 1:35. She put her shoes back on, ending her list with the most powerful reason to hate Lewis Taylor: he had failed to keep her sister safe.

Inside the church, Rebecca saw her mother in the foyer, surrounded by two uncles and an aunt. Rebecca hovered at the edge of this group, with her hands clasped firmly behind her back. Desperately wanting to smoke, she opened her purse to find her nicotine gum—a temporary measure she’d been using for two years. She looked inside, easily found the package and began pushing a piece out of the plastic wrapping. The crinkling seemed out of place, echoing through the church foyer, but she didn’t stop. Not even when both of her uncles turned their bald heads in her direction.

Rebecca noticed that her mother’s slip was showing, pushed past the crowd and took her mother’s hand. She wanted to offer support, not receive it, but when her mother felt Rebecca’s worry, she tightened her grip, making her daughter feel safe.

Shortly after her seventh birthday, Rebecca stood on her neighbour’s lawn and held Lisa’s hand as they watched an attendant push their mother up the front walk. It was the first time they had seen her in seven months. Her mother bounced when the wheelchair hit a crack in the sidewalk. Her arms rested on top of an orange blanket,
and her skin was very pale. Rebecca wanted to wave, but she was afraid her mother wouldn’t wave back. The attendants carried her mother up the steps and through the door that her father held open.

“There she is,” Rebecca told Lisa.

She led Lisa to the backyard and the two girls sat facing the house, looking up to the second-floor window where they knew their mother was now sleeping. Lisa pulled up a fist full of grass. She threw it back on the ground. She looked up at Rebecca.

“I’m scared, too,” Lisa said.

“They wouldn’t let her come home if she wasn’t better,” Rebecca said. She tried to think about anything else, but couldn’t.

“Why won’t they let us see her?”

“She’s tired. We can see her tomorrow,” Rebecca said.

At six o’clock Rebecca and Lisa were allowed back into the house. Dinner was in the microwave. Her father was making phone calls. Rebecca turned on the TV and found her sister’s favourite show. She raised the volume louder than it had ever been before. When her father did not ask her to turn it down, Rebecca took off her shoes and snuck through the kitchen. She climbed the stairs on her tiptoes. She was a little out of breath when she reached the top and stood in front of the door to the guest room. The door was old and didn’t shut tight. Rebecca looked through the gap. She saw her mother lying on her side, facing away. Rebecca pushed the door with her index finger until it was halfway open, and then she went into the room, moving as quietly as she could.

The blinds were down, so the room was dark, but some late-afternoon sunlight snuck through the gap between the shade and the windowsill. Her mother continued to sleep. Her blankets had slid down. She was wearing a hospital gown that tied at the back. Her skin was very white and her hair was too long. Rebecca walked to the side of the bed but did not reach out to touch her.

“It’s okay, baby,” Rebecca’s mother said. Although her eyes remained closed, she’d heard her daughter’s distress. “I’m not too far. No? Right here.”

Rebecca touched her mom’s arm. Her skin was damp and cool. Her mother rolled onto her back, and Rebecca knew she couldn’t stay. Nothing in the room felt like it was supposed to: the light coming from the edge of the blinds; the colour of her mother’s clothes; the smell of medications coming from the bedside table—all of it was wrong. Rebecca had to leave the room, but she needed something to take with her. An object she could hold, something that would continually confirm that her mother had come home. She knew she couldn’t take the pill bottles, because their absence would be noticed. She looked around, but there were very few things in the room that hadn’t been there before her mother’s return. Then she saw the identification bracelet that her mother had been wearing when they’d carried her into the house.

The bracelet had been cut and lay on the night-stand, but her mother’s full name was clearly visible in purple type. Rebecca reached for it, and when her fist was tight, she felt something very strange. The sensation was almost electric and pushed out from her chest
into her arm, through her fingertips and into the broken plastic bracelet. It made her feel like she needed to pee, and then it disappeared completely. Rebecca opened her fist and looked at the bracelet, but nothing on the outside had changed. Keeping the bracelet tightly in her hand, Rebecca left the room, closing the door as much as she could.

Putting most of her weight on the banister so that she could move as soundlessly as possible, Rebecca was attempting to sneak down the stairs when she met her father on the second landing. She closed her fist tightly to make sure the plastic bracelet could not be seen. Her father looked over her head to the door of the guest room, then back at Rebecca.

“Did you see her?”

“Yes.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” Rebecca said. This was a lie. Everything about seeing her mother weak, tired and vulnerable had disturbed Rebecca. As these feelings went through her, she waited for her father to hear them, but he didn’t. Her father simply smiled.

“That’s great. We should have let you see her earlier. I’m sorry.” He hugged her, then turned and walked down the stairs. Once her father was completely out of sight, she opened her hand and stared at the bracelet, knowing it was the only thing that was different.

For the next six weeks, while Rebecca’s mother remained in bed, Rebecca carried the plastic bracelet with her at all times. She held it in her hand while she slept. She kept it in the front right pocket of whichever pair of pants she was wearing. She never forgot to bring it with
her, not even once. When someone asked her how her she was doing, Rebecca could just say fine and they would believe her. Rebecca Reynolds finally had the power to lie.

Seven weeks later, Rebecca came home from school and found her mother watching television in the living room. She wore her housecoat, and her skin was still pale, but this was the first time Rebecca had seen her outside of the guest room.

“Come here, baby,” her mother said.

Rebecca climbed onto the couch, curling up beside her. Together they watched
The Edge of Night
. Things felt normal and Rebecca knew that this moment would have been impossible if the bracelet hadn’t been in her pocket. Otherwise, she would have been too afraid to let her mother feel how frightened she really was.

After the success of the bracelet, other experiments quickly followed. When she failed to land an axel in competition, Rebecca kept her skate laces. When her teacher gave her a failing grade, she took his coffee mug. When Jenny Benders didn’t invite her to her birthday party, she stole her hair clip.

All of her keepsakes were put into a shoebox, which she kept underneath her bed. It wasn’t long before there were two shoeboxes. Then three and four and five.

When Rebecca turned fourteen, she began collecting mementos from all the good moments in her life. Her emotions had become so powerful and important to her that when one of them left her, she felt incredibly vulnerable. Keeping these feelings of joy to herself kept her from feeling exposed. It gave her some privacy. It soon became a habit that every time Rebecca experienced a moment that produced any
significant emotion, happy or sad, she stored a souvenir. The number of boxes under her bed grew and grew. By the time she was sixteen, the shoeboxes were stacked three high and took up all the space under her bed. When she went to university, she took the shoeboxes with her and rented apartments based on closet space. When the closets weren’t big enough, she got rid of her roommate and used the second bedroom. Then the living room. Then the kitchen. Finally, Rebecca rented unit #207 from E.Z. Self Storage near the corner of Queen and Broadview in downtown Toronto and moved all of her boxes there, where they were safely secured under lock and key.

“Where’s Dad?” Rebecca asked.

“He’s inside. Where’s Lewis?”

Rebecca’s response was a guilty feeling, mystifying her mother. She felt guilty because it was her fault that Lisa had married Lewis in the first place.

When Lisa finished high school, she and Lewis had moved to Halifax together to attend the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Lewis still thought of Lisa as nothing more than a friend—the apartment they rented had two bedrooms. Even more than she hated Lewis, Rebecca hated knowing that her sister would never get her heart’s desire.

Both sisters were home from university for the holiday, and on Christmas Eve Day their mother sent them to buy wrapping paper. It was a task easily accomplished. With time to kill and a desire to avoid a relative-filled house, Rebecca and Lisa drove around and eventually parked in the lot of their old high school.

“Do you remember those white jeans that Phillip Wilson used to wear?” Rebecca asked.

“Lewis still thinks of me as a friend. I don’t know what to do.”

For some moments it was quiet inside the car. For once, it was Rebecca who saw the simple solution. “Where are the bedrooms in your apartment?” she asked.

“At the front.”

“Right next to each other?”

“Yes.”

“So you share a wall?”

“Yeah.”

“How thick is it?”

“It’s not thick at all.” Lisa turned in her seat and faced her sister. “It’s really thin. Are you suggesting what I think you are?”

“Do you really love him?”

“You know I do.”

“Is he worthy of you?”

“I know you don’t think he is, but he really is.”

“So, yes, I am suggesting that. Everyone and anyone. Start the night you get back, if you can.”

Lisa took her older sister’s advice. The shared wall proved even less soundproof than imagined. Lewis lasted three weeks. Nineteen months later, they were married. Rebecca’s plan had worked, and she’d never forgiven herself for it.

“Rebecca?” her mother repeated.

“We almost got in an accident. Then he just left. He walked away. He said he was sorry.” Rebecca looked up at her mother and tried to smile. “Should we go in?”

“Okay.”

Still holding her mother’s hand as they walked into the church, Rebecca saw her father sitting in a pew at the very front. But as they walked towards him, Rebecca began to feel very strange. With each step she took the strange feeling grew. And as she took her seat beside her father, she realized it wasn’t a strange feeling. It was no feeling at all.

One thousand, eight hundred and four kilometres west of Lisa’s funeral, Stewart Findley waited on the top step of the only post office in Morris, Manitoba. Metaphorically, Stewart was waiting for a number of things to happen, but at this precise moment he was waiting for Margaret, his boss, who was now forty-seven minutes late.

Taking his cellphone from his pocket, Stewart confirmed that he had no missed calls and then hopped down the steps to the sidewalk. He looked south down Main Street but still didn’t see her. He kicked the large cube, which was made of several layers of folded canvas, at the bottom of the stairs, then turned and continued to wait. As he checked his cellphone again, he heard Margaret’s truck.

The truck came into view, red, old and given to as many eccentricities as its driver. Seeing Margaret behind the wheel, Stewart tried once again to guess her age. Of all the strange things about her—she seldom blinked, her skin often had a greenish tinge to it, she was very strong, and she owned and operated a hotel that rarely had guests—it was her indeterminate age that Stewart found the most perplexing. He had been the Prairie Embassy Hotel’s only employee for three and a half years, but he had never been able to figure out how old Margaret was.
His highest guess was seventy and his lowest was thirty-seven; with both estimations he’d been confident that he’d finally got it right. As Stewart watched Margaret park in front of the post office, he made another guess: fifty-seven, as there was something taxed and sweaty about her today.

Leaving the engine running, Margaret slid across the seat and out the passenger door. She kissed Stewart on both cheeks. “The goddamn council meeting went long,” she said. “Guess what the idiot’s solution to the drought is?”

“Which idiot is this?”

“The mayor. Fifty-four days, with crops perishing in the fields, and what’s his brilliant idea? He’s hiring rainmakers. Two of them, father and son. I said they could stay at the hotel for free.”

Stewart ordinarily had little interest in the doings of the Morris Town Council, and today he cared even less. With a sweeping motion, he pointed to the cube of folded canvas on the sidewalk. It measured three feet on each side. Margaret immediately recognized what it was.

“Is that it?” she asked.

“It is.”

“Your boat has a sail!” Margaret punched him in the arm, the impact knocking Stewart off balance.

For three years, six months and one day Stewart had been the Prairie Embassy Hotel’s only employee. This, less three weeks, was exactly the amount of time he’d been building his sailboat. Although Margaret had witnessed every stage of construction, she’d never commented on the fact that he was building a sailboat in the middle of the Canadian Prairies. Or, more specifically, on
a bend of the Red River that could float a boat only once a year, for a few days during spring runoff. But Margaret was not someone who needed to pry. This was partly her respect for privacy and partly due to her love of eccentricity, but mainly because she had secrets of her own.